The Hundred Years' War on Palestine

Outline

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine (2020) presents the modern history of Palestine as a hundred-year struggle that began with the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Rashid Khalidi describes six key moments, from the British Mandate and the Nakba of 1948 to the wars and negotiations of later decades, as turning points in this conflict. Drawing on his own family’s archives and experiences in Jerusalem, he gives the Palestinian story a personal and historical voice.

• The book frames modern Palestinian history as one hundred years of struggle, starting with the Balfour Declaration in 1917.
• Khalidi organises the story around six key moments that he treats as turning points in the conflict.
• Those moments run from the British Mandate and the Nakba of 1948 to the wars and negotiations of later decades.
• Khalidi draws on his own family's archives and experiences in Jerusalem to give the Palestinian story a personal voice.
• The book reads the conflict through colonialism, global power, displacement, and resistance, not as a purely local dispute.

Rashid Khalidi is a Palestinian-American historian and the Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. He comes from a prominent Jerusalem family and has written extensively on the history of Palestine and the Middle East. His other books include Palestinian Identity and The Iron Cage.